Metropolitan Bank

City: New York

State: New York

The Metropolitan Bank associated in New York City in April 1851 with $250,000 in capital. The organizers of the bank planned to name it The Bank of the Metropolis but settled on Metropolitan Bank when they found that another institution had already secured their intended name. By the middle of April 1851, two million dollars of capital had been subscribed, and the bank’s board of directors elected James McCall as the institution’s first president and John E. Williams as cashier. Williams succeeded McCall as president of the bank in 1857. Abraham Lincoln occasionally had recourse to purchasing drafts on Metropolitan Bank in order to make payments or transfer funds outside of Illinois. He used such drafts to provide funds for his son, Robert T. Lincoln, during the latter’s education at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, and to transfer a portion of his own savings when he departed Springfield to take up the presidency in 1861.

New-York Spectator, 14 April 1851, 2:3; The Evening Post (NY), 22 April 1851, 3:3; J. Smith Homans, ed., The Bankers’ Magazine and Statistical Register (New York: J. Smith Homans, Jr., 1857), 11:901; Harry E. Pratt, The Personal Finances of Abraham Lincoln (Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1943), 122-23, 169, 170, 172-75, 179.